Tuesday, 24 March 2015

I can't promise that this will still be the opening to Chinese Burn when I finish the book, but in the meantime, it's something to be going on with...

Sam
Blackett looked up from the People's Pilsner that sat in front of her, beads of
perspiration now rolling down the glass. Not a drop had passed her lips. It was
a shame that she couldn't claim as much for the four or five that had come and
gone before it. And she had started the evening with the very best of
intentions... a cheap meal, then back to the hotel for an early night.

So
what the hell was she now doing in the lush, white, art deco interior of the
top floor restaurant of Shanghai's Peninsula Hotel? She had needed cheering up.
And that would explain the first drink. The rest she could blame on Roger -- at
least, she thought that his name was Roger. He'd approached her at the bar with
a straight-forward, 'hello, can I buy you a drink?' After spending the last few
days wandering around the city with only her own company, she had said yes
without even thinking. And here they were, an eighty dollar steak and several
bottles of People's Pilsner later.

He
was staring out across the Huangpu River at the glowing swelter of light from
the Bund. The temperature on the restaurant's terrace had dropped to no more
than a couple of degrees below the sweat-sodden heat of the day. He turned back
to her suddenly. "So, do you wanna go up to my room?" he said, his
Midwest accent slightly burred with drink.

"Not
particularly," she replied, and smiled.

Roger's
shoulders twitched in a snort of laughter that died before it got to his throat.

"Well,
I guess that's straight-forward," he said, and rose unsteadily to his
feet. A moment later a flicker of alarm crossed his face and he lurched towards
the railing.

"Whoa,
steady," said Sam as she moved to grab him. They both peered down from the
fourteenth floor. "Don't want to fall from here," she added, watching
his face as she did so.

"Let
me give you a hand, I think that last Mai-tai might have been too much,"
she said, a little crease between her eyebrows.

"Not
sure it was that one in particular..." said Roger, his words starting to
openly slur.

Typical, thought Sam;
as soon as sex was off-the-table he let the alcohol steamroller him. The usual
disappointment. He'd been such a good listener while she had explained how she
came to be alone in a five star restaurant in Shanghai. An explanation that had
somehow involved a fairly detailed description of the relationship-crash she
had suffered in India with the man she had -- briefly, admittedly -- thought
that she might spend the rest of her life with. And then the Esquire article's
advice on which questions to ask had run out; or a natural need to talk had
resurfaced. Either way, she had then listened to him slurp his way through half
a dozen very expensive cocktails while moaning about the money problems his
business was suffering back in Detroit.

Roger
stumbled the first couple of steps towards the terrace doors, and then lurched
to a halt by the next table. She stepped beside him and took a firm grip of his
forearm. It looked like she was going to his room after all.

I
bet it did, she thought, as she guided him unsteadily around the tables. He
bumped into several of them, but there was only one other couple left in the
terrace bar, and they were very self-absorbed, away in the far corner. She got
Roger into the restaurant, more careful to steer him away from contact now, as
all the tables had been cleared and freshly laid. She checked her watch. It was
almost three am.

They
made it to the elevators. Roger sank against the wall as she pressed the call
button. A moment later, the elevator
doors slid silently open and with a huge sigh, he pushed himself back off the
wall. They stepped inside, Sam pressed the button for the fourth floor, and
again in silence, they began the short descent.

Sam
just had time to wonder how easy it would be to find a cab to get back to her
hotel at this time of night, when they stopped and the doors slid open. The
notice on the wall opposite told her which way they needed to go, and she
levered Roger out into the corridor. He was now struggling to stand, and she
had to get his arm over her shoulders to help support him the fifty yards to
his room.She
propped him back against the wall beside the door, and helped him find his
keycard, tucked conveniently into the top pocket of his suit jacket. She opened
the door and got him up off the wall. He lurched around the corner into the
room. Sam felt that she had done her duty and, anxious not to give him the
wrong message, she let him go and stayed on the threshold. He stopped a few
paces into the room when he realised that she was no longer with him, and
turned. He was standing there looking at
her, very drunk and faintly disappointed, when the man came at him from behind
the still open door. There was no time for any reaction to reach Roger's face
before the assailant was on him.

Friday, 27 February 2015

The monthly diary reminder just popped up to tell me that the next time I get
a few spare minutes, I really should write a blog. The trouble is that I’ve just
about reached a stage in the new novel (Chinese Burn) where it’s got some
momentum and a life of its own. I can see the end. So, much as I’d like to give you my thoughts on
the first ever Jack Reacher novel (which I'm about half way through)… it’ll have to wait till I’ve finished my
own.

Tuesday, 20 January 2015

It’s been a couple
of weeks since Season Four of Homeland finished, and I posted on Facebook at
the time that I thought this Guardian review was generous.

I posted that the final episode was botched together after they learned that they had got the
money for Season 5… and perhaps I should explain that a little more with some wild
and completely unsubstantiated speculation...

So let’s imagine it’s
early in the first US transmission, and the writing team are meeting to agree
the trajectory of the final episodes of Season Four which still have to be shot.
The ratings aren’t going particularly well, and it looks like they won’t get
the money for Season Five. So they say to hell with it, let’s finish it with a
bang…

Let’s kill Saul off before he can get out of Pakistan. Then Quinn
kills Haqqani with a pipe bomb attack, and goes down in a hail of bullets. Carrie
watches him die helplessly, goes home to mourn him and her father both, but
takes on the role of mother to her child after leaving the CIA.

Brilliant! Action
packed to the finale, all tied up in a tragic-but-happy ending that makes
complete sense with what’s gone before, with Carrie finally out of the
self-destructive job. The End.

Then they start
showing the episodes with the attack on the embassy, and suddenly there’s a
huge surge in ratings. The cash tills ring and the studio execs demand more…
suddenly the money is on the table for Season Five. Uh-oh, but everybody dies,
or retires! Quick! Rewrite! Reshoot!

So they fudge the last
episode and the final couple of minutes of the penultimate one with completely new
material. Saul doesn’t die. Quinn is persuaded by Carrie not to blow up Haqqani
(really?), and lo and behold – deux ex
machina grinding audibly in the background – it’s all ok, the CIA have it
covered after all! Dar Adal is in the car with Haqqani!

Implausible.
Unlikely. Improbable… and lots of other synonyms.

Then they have to
shoot a new final episode, back in the US with none of the locations they have
used for the rest of the season. So they come up with the ridiculous mechanic
of the mother turning up.

“Good drama tends
to let characterisation guide the plot, so to have such a significant figure
turn up merely to help Carrie learn a couple of life lessons was very weak
indeed,” said the Guardian. No s##t.

I rest my case. And
on to the Game of Thrones, which I got for Christmas…

Friday, 12 December 2014

One of those
questions that you get asked pretty regularly as a writer is... what do you
read? The short answer is not as much as I’d like these days, while the
slightly longer answer is the same stuff that I write. I’ve always been a big
thriller reader, ever since I discovered that there were James Bond books as
well as movies...

I’ve just finished
Never Go Back, the latest but one of the Jack Reacher series from Lee Child,
one of the top thriller writers of this generation. There are now 19 of these
books, one a year from when he started. While Child maintains a very even level
of quality in the books that I have read, I have to say that this wasn’t the
strongest ending I’ve ever seen.

In fact, it was
pretty feeble – I’m not going to spoil it for you, but it led me to start
thinking… what is it about writers that people keep going back to them even
when they have just delivered a bad book? Not that Never Go Back is a bad book,
it’s just a poor ending – but I’m already cue-ing up the new one, regardless of
my disappointment. Never Go Back is prophetic, I will, even if I shouldn't...

It’s simply not
true to say that you are only as good as your last book.

I think the
willingness to stay with an author has something to do with the amount of time
we invest in a book. If a movie’s rubbish, it’s a couple of hours you aren’t
going to get back. If a book’s rubbish, or has a disappointing ending, it’s the
best part of a day that we’ve wasted.

Now – if we take
into account that the vast majority of readers only read a couple of books a
year – we start to see why they are so conservative. If you were only going to
have two cups of coffee in 2015, you’d make damn sure that they were good ones.

It’s not surprising
that breaking down this conservativeness in book selection is nigh on impossible.
The only chink is to appeal to the much smaller proportion of people who read a
lot – they are the only ones who will take a risk on the new. And to do that, I’m
starting to think that you really have to write for a niche. And then market
hard to that niche. Everyone else just wants to read the same stuff as everyone
else. Bad endings or not.

Tuesday, 11 November 2014

I just checked the
date of the last post on this blog and it’s the 28th March 2014. It’s just over
six months ago, and it happens to be the day when my wife and I moved with our
eight month old son to our new house.

It wasn’t far. The
new house is in the same village as the old house. It’s probably no more than a hundred
metres as the crow flies. That didn’t make it any less stressful. It was
pouring with rain. The sellers were late moving out. The boy was tired and grumpy.

Then we got the
keys, walked inside, and had one of those oh
my god moments. We had a lot of work
to do. In comparison to replacing the leaking conservatory and the ancient boiler,
fixing dodgy taps and dripping cisterns, changing carpets, painting outside and
inside… In comparison to this, blogging didn’t seem that important. Nor did
writing books. Or even reading them. Even my beloved twitter account lay
dormant for a long, long while…

Sometimes life just gets in the way, but I’m pleased to say
that this particular slice of life is now over. The house is cosy and functional and ready for the
winter storms that already seem to be whistling around my new office in the
attic. I got the new novel out again today, dusted it off, and started writing.
I’m half-way through reading a cracking Jack Reacher and I might even have
restarted twittering... and next month, I’m going to blog about writing again.

Friday, 28 March 2014

I blogged about opening lines of novels a while back, but the endings are just as interesting, if not more
so. The Huffington Post recently gathered together some of their favourites, and
it’s an article worth a look.
There are some fantastic last lines, I think my favourites from this list would have to be
either from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby; "So we beat on, boats
against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." Or from George
Orwell’s Big Brother; "He loved Big Brother". The latter is so wonderfully
bleak – something that contemporary film studios could learn from – whatever
happened to the brutal, unhappy endings?

Another that pushes
those two close is this one; “The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds,
and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed
sombre under an overcast sky – seemed to lead into the heart of an immense
darkness.” Where else could that come from but The Heart of Darkness by Joseph
Conrad?

What about you, any favourite last lines?

This is also a good moment to fess up to a guilty secret. I lifted the last line of my first
novel, The Defector, from my favourite book. It fitted perfectly - ‘Sometimes you
just know these things’ - and it seemed like a suitable tribute to pay to a book
that kinda changed the path of my life. So can anyone out there guess which book it
comes from, and does anyone have a copy on their real or virtual shelf?

Friday, 28 February 2014

They say that having children changes your life and they are right – but the bald statement
does nothing to prepare you for the moment when that gurgling, crying bundle is
in your arms for the first time. It would take a book to communicate just what
that means and how your life changes over the ensuing weeks and months, and I’m
sure there are lots of good ones... but don’t hold your breath waiting for
mine.

Some of the
consequences of Aiden’s arrival became clear very quickly; the regular trips to
the gym, the surfing and paddle-boarding, movie nights and bike rides all went
immediately. Eating out with my wonderful wife survived a bit longer, at least
until regular child bedtimes became a necessity. Reading and watching tv
struggle on in the gaps in the household routine, at least when I don’t just
keel over with the sheer overwhelming exhaustion of it all.

Babies absorb the
time and energy of their parents like black holes absorb light. Get over it. All
of the above were luxuries and I know that one day those things will be back in
my life. Meanwhile, I have the joy of the smiles, laughter and astonishing
growth and development of my little boy to weigh against what’s gone.

Other consequences
have been slower to emerge. For a while now I’ve pursued a career as a novelist
around the edges of a career as a journalist and non-fiction writer. Followers
of this blog will have watched my thrillers transition from big trade
publishing houses to independent- or self-publication. I’ve charted the process
of commissioning covers and editors, of formatting, finding translators, booking adverts and writing blurbs.

It’s been a blast
and before Aiden, I had time to do all this and to write the books. But
suddenly time has become a lot more precious and I now find myself making
choices that I don’t want to make. Should I reformat the backlist to include
links to the newly published book, or write another 500 words on the
work-in-progress? Should I book an advert and run a price promotion, or write
another 500 words on the work-in-progress?

I’ve been choosing
the former (and the short-term gain) far
too often. The consequence has been that the work-in-progress just isn’t
progressing. I’m a lot less philosophical about that than I am about the
surfing and movies; writing fiction isn’t so much a luxury as a fundamental
part of who I think I am… cue a minor existential crisis.

All this was in my
mind when I was flicking through my blogroll over the Xmas holidays, and I
found Bob Mayer talking about expanding his Cool Gus publishing list in 2014.
I’ve been a regular follower of the work of Bob and his partner Jen Talty for a
couple of years now, and I very much like what they do, how they operate and
their strategic view of the fast-changing publishing world.

So I emailed them
the same day, we chatted a bit on email and then on Skype, and to cut a long
story short, I’m very pleased to say that Cool Gus will be taking over the
publication of all my novels, old and new, starting right now. Jen is already
working on new covers (the first of which you can see here, a stunning new cover for Powder Burn), and you will soon
start to see the changes roll out on Amazon, in the iBookstore and on the Nook.

There will be so many advantages to this that I barely know where to start - editorial support and help, new energy and ideas for marketing, great production facilities... and of course - although we still
have a lot of work to do to get the new editions out - it will soon leave me much more time to
write new fiction. I can’t wait to get back to it... :-)